Old Dog/New Trick: connecting Cisco CM 8.5 to Avaya G3csi ACM 2.x

[rjweber]

I'm the old dog picking up telephony responsibilities for my company. Three years ago, new IT director came to town and decided Cisco networking and phone (CM with Unity Connection) was the way to go. We built a new manufacturing facility which was to be the model for our other manufacturing facilities. Our Corporate headquarters has a 13 year old Avaya G3csi system in place. Company wants to move over 20 employees from various departments from corporate to this new manufacturing facility. They want to be able to transfer calls between the buildings (can they keep their existing DIDs?). I've got sales people involved telling me we need upgrades, we need new call center software, we need new servers....this and this and that, but is there anyone out there that can tell me simply what is needed to connect a Cisco IP system to an Avaya Digital/Analog PBX to transfer calls between the buildings using MLPS network? I don't want to add any other functionality; well, we do want to upgrade our Cisco from 8.5 to 9.1, but other than that - no additional functionality.
Any ideas or help would be appreciated. I understand I didn't give you much to go on here, but thanks for whatever you can supply.

 

[whykap]

If your avaya is on the network then you can connect the two via SIP or h323.
I am assuming here that your 13yr old avaya can support one of those.
If MPLS is your only connection to the two buildings that's the best choice.

If the avaya doesn't support those then you can install a sip gateway on the corporate building and convert the signal to a PRI that goes into he avaya. You can do that with a cisco cube or a third party product